Americans prepare for long battle in shadows

John DiamondWashington Bureau

America's war on terrorism will last for years and will involve everything from elite Special Forces capable of killing or capturing individual leaders to conventional weaponry able to devastate nations that harbor terrorists, top Bush administration officials said Sunday.

The war that began suddenly last week with the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon will be a dirty business, officials said, and may have no clear ending.

Victory will come not with a surrender ceremony or the liberation of a country but when deadly terrorist attacks no longer occur, raising the specter that America may never be entirely free of terrorism.

And unlike America's most recent military campaigns, such as the Persian Gulf war and the NATO missions in the Balkans, it may require Americans to put aside their post-Vietnam aversion to combat casualties.

"What this war is about is our way of life, and our way of life is worth losing life for," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said. "The era of antiseptic warfare, planes dropping bombs from 20,000 feet, cruise missiles flying off in the night--no one getting hurt on the United States or coalition side--that will not work with this enemy."

And unlike Vietnam, there will be no option to withdraw. The enemy has struck the homeland. There is nowhere to withdraw.

The Pentagon and U.S. intelligence may succeed in capturing a key terrorist organizer. The FBI may arrest suspects in the U.S. But much fighting will remain. And much of it might well be in the shadows, covert operations that the U.S. will not carry out in the open as American intelligence and law-enforcement agencies seek to dry up terrorists' financial support networks, then find and kill them.

"It will be a campaign," said Secretary of State Colin Powell, one of several top administration officials making the rounds of the Sunday talk shows. "The measure of success at the end of the day will be no more attacks like this or of any other nature against the United States and our interests around the world."

The main weapons of the war on terrorism will not be the guided bombs, tanks and fighter planes that Americans saw in action during the Persian Gulf war a decade ago.

These combat troops are capable of sneaking into hostile territory, watching an adversary for days and carrying out missions--capturing or killing a terrorist leader, for example--without the huge logistical tail that follows most U.S. military deployments.

President Bush's national security team faces monumental challenges in planning this war. In the short term, planners may want to fulfill the public desire for rapid military action with a powerful and symbolic strike. But Bush and his aides do not want to act hastily and jeopardize American public support or backing from allies overseas.

Yet the longer they wait to act, the more difficult it may become to deliver the kind of punishing blow that will prove effective in the long term against global terrorism.

The fight ahead is not the kind of battle the Pentagon has mastered nor highly valued. For years, unconventional warfare has been a secondary concern within the armed forces, as military and political leaders placed higher priority on expensive, high-tech weapons systems, spreading the economic benefits to virtually every congressional district in the nation.

Now the nation faces a different kind of fight, and clear-cut victories may be scarce, given the enemy's capacity to hide in plain sight, as did the perpetrators of Tuesday's deadly hijackings. Progress will be difficult to measure, so popular support may be difficult to maintain.

Coalitions may prove fragile if U.S. military forces harm large numbers of civilians. And the kind of fighting that will be required does not play into America's military strengths--the high-tech weaponry that overwhelmed the army of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

"It's certainly not our strong suit," said Andrew Krepinevich of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington-based think tank. "There's not much question we have the military firepower to destroy these terrorist cells. What we need is the intelligence as to where are they and when."

The U.S. has had little recent experience with this kind of warfare, and what experience it has gained has involved painful lessons. There was the debacle in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 when Army Rangers trying to capture a local warlord were caught in a deadly ambush. And there was the 1998 cruise missile strike that destroyed terrorist camps in Afghanistan but missed the intended target--exiled Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden.

Rumsfeld said the Pentagon will use some of its emergency funding approved last week by Congress to enlarge the Special Operations Forces that stand at 35,000, less than 3 percent of the overall force. Up to now, the direction of Rumsfeld's planning has been toward reducing the size of the military force in favor of costly high-tech weapons such as the F-22 fighter.

Special Forces are unconventional, Rumsfeld said, "and we're dealing with an unconventional time and we may very well need more of them."

War on several fronts

More than any single military option, Bush administration officials Sunday emphasized that the key to defeating terrorism will be employing the full range of options, from economic sanctions and an investigative attack on the terrorist financial structure to covert operations and the full might of U.S. arms.

The Bush administration named Al Qaeda, Arabic for "The Base," a global network headed by bin Laden, as the main architect of Tuesday's terrorist attacks, the deadliest in history.

Al Qaeda operatives work in at least 60 countries, including the United States. Thus the Bush administration is gearing up for a world war. But because bin Laden is believed to be holed up in Afghanistan, that country's ruling Islamic Taliban party is the focus of U.S. pressure, and thinly veiled threats.

As his father did in the gulf war, President Bush is assembling a coalition of nations to join in the war on terrorism, including Pakistan, which shares a long border with Afghanistan. Their role may have less to do with providing bases for conventional military operations than with penetrating terrorist networks within their borders and passing on vital intelligence about them to the U.S.

"This is an enemy that intends to remain hidden. It's a very resourceful enemy," Powell said. "And so we have to attack on all fronts and we have to do it with a broad coalition because this enemy is spread out across the world."

Senior Bush administration officials emerging Sunday after huddling with Bush at his Camp David retreat in Maryland, described a second facet to an emerging two-track military strategy. In addition to engaging terrorists with Special Forces, police, spies and allies, the U.S. may use overwhelming conventional force against states that sponsor terrorism.

The terrorists "do not have high-value targets that the typical weapons of war can go in and attack," Rumsfeld said. But states that sponsor terrorism do. And Vice President Dick Cheney, appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," made clear that nations that refuse to join the U.S. in the war on terrorism and continue to harbor terrorists will "face the full wrath of the United States of America."

Cheney, however, appeared to pull the administration back from an assertion made last week by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz that the administration would seek the "ending" of states that harbor terrorists. On Sunday, Cheney said the goal would be not to overthrow such states, but to get them to "cease and desist" in their support of terrorism.

The real goal, then, is not to wage war on uncooperative states but to level a threat that would force these states to assist the U.S.

Nations cooperating

It may be working. Iran, a nation on the U.S. list of states that sponsor terrorism, appears to be cooperating with Washington by sealing off its border with Afghanistan. There have been encouraging signs that Syria might offer some help.

"There is some serious stuff coming down and these countries may calculate that it is in their interest to cooperate with us in order not to have some of that stuff fall on them," former CIA Director Robert Gates said in a telephone interview.

America should prepare for a dirty war, Cheney said, one the CIA will help fight, unfettered by rules that have restricted cooperation with unsavory characters who may have been involved in violence.

"We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world," Cheney said. "A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion. . . . It is a mean, nasty, dangerous, dirty business out there, and we have to operate in that arena."

Asked specifically about whether Bush would consider ordering the assassination of specific terrorists, Rumsfeld did not rule it out.

"I'm not a lawyer, but there's no question but that the United States needs to deal with the [terrorist] network, and the network involves people," Rumsfeld said. "And it's a matter of going after them and stopping them from doing what they're doing."